How The Democratic Party Stands Between Its Most Loyal Constituents And The Jobs They Need
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Though I agree with the article in large measure I will retain my view that there is no such thing as "keeping a FREE PEOPLE 'poor'". The default condition of man is poverty. Wealth creation or aggregation strategies are needed to produce wealth.
Indeed there is such a thing as producing an economic and 'social justice' narrative by which people who have far more opportunity than does the average person around the world fail to see the potential that resides before them - all though not in the orderly manner that they might expect. When a person with the same characteristics come into this nation and take advantage of this opportunity that this nation offers then indeed it is time to start questioning the incumbent order and those who maintain such a consciousness.
Asked about the recently defeated plan to convert the gigantic fortress that looms over his neighborhood into a shopping mall, C says he hasn't heard about it. If the plan had gone through, Manhattan-based developer Related Companies would have received about $50 million in tax subsidies for a project that would have created as many as a thousand retail jobs and, during its construction, employed a thousand or more highly paid union hardhats. But the city council killed the project. The Bronx delegation demanded that Related enforce upon its leaseholders a requirement that all of the jobs in the mall pay at least $10 an hour, plus benefits, much more than the prevailing wage in the Forever21-and-food-court racket, to say nothing of the $7.25 minimum wage. So a $300 million project, and a couple of thousand new jobs in a neighborhood that needs them, never happened. Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. infamously declared: "The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies." The New York Post pithily pointed out that when it comes to real jobs, Diaz has never had one--not in the private sector, anyway--and neither has any other member of the Bronx's city-council delegation: All are lifelong politicians, many of them having held elected offices or political appointments since their early 20s. Diaz himself has been an officeholder since he was 23 years old. It's good work, if you can get it.
The Minimum Wage: Holding Out For An Artificial Wage Floor That Few "Consumer Of Labor" Seek To Purchase
So frequently the rhetorical question that is asked by those who are "living wage" supporters against those who notate the impact of the "minimum wage" is - "So would you support slavery? As it is the result of your 'rush to the bottom' wage strategy".
Beyond the point that the present machine based production environment makes the return to chattel slavery less likely than ever - they fail to enumerate the real costs of maintaining their position. When we talk about prison sentences, broken families and homicides they typically put these costs upon the GOVERNMENT via the expenditures that are driven in maintain these points or as a consequence. What we need to do is to also put these costs upon the community/family/individuals as we work to understand the cost of removing labor from the market as salaries beyond the perceived value to the "consumer of labor" are demanded.
Even when there is an attempt to mask the higher wage rates within a government contract that mandates them - the costs are still borne by the tax payers. I is ironic that I heard a radio show this morning ("Tell Me More") in which they noted that the Catholic Schools had a FREE labor source in the "sisters" who operated as nuns and teachers in the schools. This free labor allowed the Catholic community to provide needed educational services to the people and retain their cultural underpinnings as a result.
Clearly there is a problem between the perceptions of whom is benefiting from the labor that is "exploited" and the need to activate the minds and bodies of these people who are now unemployed.
THE first answer many economists will give to that question is: the minimum wage. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who spent much of his career showing how government programs reliably end up hurting those they are intended to help, was scathing on the subject, calling the minimum wage "one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books." And he's not alone: Acongressional survey of economic research on the subject, "50 Years of Research on the Minimum Wage," has a string of conclusion lines that read like an indictment, the first three counts being: "The minimum wage reduces employment. The minimum wage reduces employment more among teenagers than adults. The minimum wage reduces employment most among black teenage males." Other items on the bill: "The minimum wage hurts small businesses generally. The minimum wage causes employers to cut back on training. The minimum wage has long-term effects on skills and lifetime earnings. The minimum wage hurts the poor generally. The minimum wage helps upper-income families. The minimum wage helps unions." Helping the affluent and high-wage union workers at the expense of the young, the poor, the unskilled, and small businesses: That amounts to a lot of different kinds of injustice, and it also amounts to a wealth transfer from blacks to whites.
Congressional Report :50 Years Of Research On The Minimum Wage
THE damage done by the minimum wage is real, but it's not the only impediment to black employment, and maybe not even the most serious one when it comes to the big cities. Black workers in Philadelphia, for example, have long complained about being excluded from the overwhelmingly white building-trades unions, the carpenters' and electrical-workers' guilds that are run by a largely Irish-American coterie headed by Pat Gillespie at the Building Trades Council and John J. Dougherty Jr. ("Johnny Doc") at the IBEW Local 98. Their unions are 80 percent white and 99 percent male, and the numbers are similar in other cities. Irritatingly for the Philadelphia politicians who are beholden to them, 70 percent of the building-trades unions' members live out in the suburbs rather than in the city. Wilson Goode Jr., a member of the Philadelphia city council, has made black workers' exclusion from the unions a keynote issue. He's a deep-dipped liberal, an affirmative-action supporter and a conventional urban Democrat in almost every respect, but he has noticed the strange fact that progressive programs sold as tools to help the city's largely black working class mostly end up putting money in the pockets of well-off white people in the suburbs. Philadelphia is a city with real black political power, but in a contest between a black city councilman working to secure good jobs for his constituents and the white union chieftains who have been running Philadelphia as a personal fiefdom since time immemorial, Wilson Goode Jr. found out who the boss is, and it's not him.
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